Blot,erase,delete: How the author found her voice and why all writers should resist the urge to change their past words

Author Hilary Mantel was mute in childhood but then picked up a pen and let permanent ink flow. Here she writes about the importance of sticking to your words, from battling 1980s newspaper censors in Saudi Arabia to the recent Brexit vote. Illustration by Molly Crabapple

I HAVE BEEN TRYING to think back to what it was like when I was seen and not heard: when I was too young to talk: when nothing was transmitted but everything received: when I had the luxury of listening without a reply needed: when I could judge without responsibility: when I simply existed, with no further action required. When you are dumb, the world puts on a show. No one knows what you are thinking, or even if you are thinking, before you are old enough to speak.

It’s said I prolonged this situation, to the point of enquiry: “Doesn’t she talk, what’s wrong with her?” But parents are unreliable witnesses. They make up stories about your infancy to suit what they have decided is your character. Also – though they would never admit this – they mix up siblings, and misreport their early words and deeds. I could flatter myself by claiming I waited to speak till I had something to say. But I guess our first words are stupid ones. And throughout childhood I felt the attraction of sliding back into muteness. If they asked a silly question at school – what I thought was a silly question – I just didn’t answer. I kept up this recalcitrance till I was 11. There was a schoolroom crime called “dumb insolence”, but I don’t think anyone mistook my silence for that offence. I looked so sorry about it, I suppose.

In those days I was groaning under a burden of truth. In my family, as in so many, an active censorship bore on both past and present. There were things you could say in the house, but not out of the house; perhaps there was a third category of things you could say in the garden. It is hard for a child to learn where the boundaries are, and also difficult not to be in the wrong place when adults utter what they regret. Aged eight or so, I seemed to lose my hearing for a year. Anything you said, I asked in a tone of hard incredulity to have repeated: “What?” I must have developed a protective filter, because in time I could hear again. The voice continued to say “What?” but it spoke inside. There were things you knew but must study to unknow, and things that could only be said allegorically. By way of allegory, a child might have a symptom. My brother couldn’t catch his breath. No chance of saying the wrong thing, when you couldn’t even breathe.

The time comes when you take up the pen. It is mightier than the sword, you hear. In my memoir Giving Up The Ghost, I wrote about the child’s toy called the “magic slate”, which enabled you to write with a stylus on a sheet of transparent film, and have your writing appear – grey and faint, easily erased by pulling up a tab. I entered into a paradise of free expression, but: “One day the light caught the surface at a certain angle, and when I held the slate away from me and turned it I saw that the pen left marks in the plastic sheet, like the tracks of writing on water. It would have been possible, with some labour and diligence, to discover the words even after they had been erased. After that I left aside the magic slate…”

Illustration: Molly Crabapple

At my primary school we wrote with nib pens. Ink was poured into wells which were silted, muddy at the bottom; only the top, to the depth of a fingertip, remained liquid, and if you plunged your pen further in, the nib emerged fuzzy and clogged by the accretions of the generations: the shaving of cedar pencils formed the grit at the bottom of the sump, together with hair torn from the exasperated head, dust motes that had floated in the sunlight before the Great War, compacted paper balls soaked by our grandparents some idle afternoon. Maybe this was why, when I began to write, I wrote like an Edwardian. Some children – some girls – had blotting paper and applied it every three or four words, so that their lines appeared deliberately antiqued, ready-faded, half-expunged. Their process drove me into a frenzy of irritation and dislike: the slow, painful scratch of metal as it snagged rough paper: the goggle-eyed stare at the result, as if the writer had insulted herself: the slow reaching for the pink sheet, the emphatic, vengeful pressure on the page.

I never trusted the blotters. Now they remind me of those people who jump up and wash straight after sex. Ink is a generative fluid. If you don’t mean your words to breed consequences, don’t write at all; the only tip you can give to a prospective writer is “Try to mean what you say”. We feel protected when we write on a screen, but (as with the magic slate) we can be fooled. Erasure seems simple – blink and it’s gone, overwrite the line. But nothing ever really goes away. The internet keeps regurgitating you. You can’t bury or burn your traces. They won’t be nibbled by rats, who used to love vellum, or munched by tropical ants, or consumed in the small fires that afflicted archives every few years, leaving scorched and partial truths for historians to frown over. You could get nostalgic about holes in the ground, graves for data: about the old days when they buried bad news. It seems you can’t hide, repent or change your mind. As soon as you sit before the screen you start haunting yourself.

There was a time, early in my high-school life, when crossing-out was forbidden. No tearing out of pages either. You must show your workings. The painful steps towards error must be clear to all. I think it was a rule made so that our exercise books wouldn’t fall apart, but at the time it seemed like a particularly peevish form of persecution and control. When my enemies raided my desk, they attacked my exercise books, but it was the blank sheets they tore out; my enemies were not very bright. At some stage I must have made a commitment to commitment, and to stand by my mistakes, because I noticed that only bubbleheads used washable, bright blue ink, and took to Permanent Black. Accidents will happen, of course. Probably people now won’t have breathed it in or seen it: the bitter, metallic, ineradicable spill.

In the early 1980s I went to live in Saudi Arabia, which was then the Empire of Deletion, the world capital of crossing-out. Pre-internet, there was only print to be censored, though certain public sculptures had been removed. There was a street informally known as Thumb Street, though the thumb had been taken down long before we came; it was in case people had the idea of worshipping it, I suppose, for it was irreligious to represent the human form. In those days if you bought an imported newspaper or magazine, the censors had worked through it carefully. They crayoned black drapery across the welling breasts of starlets. They hampered the muscled legs of women athletes by giving them skirts, rudely triangular and sloping at the hem, their brio and haste and hatred and lust all skidding across the picture in big black lines from a permanent marker.

The effort was touching: the meticulous thoroughness. The authorities could have banned the newspaper. But that would attract comment. Besides, an army of highly trained human erasers must have work. I imagined grey hangars on the desert’s fringe, where the contaminated material was carried in and out by men in protective suits, moving silently across the roads of the kingdom in unmarked vans. Probably it wasn’t like that; but there was no way of finding out how it was. Some of the erasers were charged with reading the back of food packets for recipes, and eradicating the word “pork” wherever it occurred, so removing from the world the very idea of pig. Keep the dietary laws, by all means, but what is forbidden goes trit-trot through your dreams; pigs came to them by night, I think, pink or piebald, hairy or smooth, huffing in their ears and rolling in their duvets. Yet the effort of deletion persisted. The existence of women was tackled by placing them under black curtains. The existence of Israel was tackled by simply leaving it off the maps.

This army of erasers came back to my mind at the time of the EU referendum, when the urban legend spread that votes for “Leave” would be rubbed out by an army of secret service personnel, and Brexiteers began to take their own pens into the polling booth. How we laughed! But then as soon as the result was in, millions signed a petition to rub it out and do it again. The bien-pensant suggested the result was not binding, but advisory – an opinion they would hardly have offered had the vote gone the other way. For a long time people have suspected that voting was futile; that politicians did not mean their promises even at the time they made them; that even though they were printed, recorded, filmed, painted on vans and driven about the streets, they could be blinked away, vanished at will. Sometimes people speak allegorically, through folk-panics: we make our mark, but they just rub us out. I thought it was odd, when the MP Jo Cox was murdered in the street, that campaigning in the referendum was suspended. She was a politician – and so they stopped politics? If a poet died, would you say, “Out of respect, ease off the verse?” If a historian died, would you try to stop events? A better tribute to her would have been to continue the campaign, interposing a day in which all parties spoke the truth. But the world is not ready for that kind of memorial. It might violate some untested physical law, so we end in mass-drownings or a ball of fire.

Credit: Anita Corbin

It has always been axiomatic that when the dying speak, they cannot lie. I knew a man whose mother told him, as she lay dying, who his real father was: like a woman in a Victorian melodrama. She might as well have climbed out of bed and kicked his feet from under him. The truth was far too late to do him any good, and just in time to plunge him into misery and confusion and the complex grief of a double loss. Some truths have a sell-by date. Some should not be uttered even by the dying. Some cannot be uttered. When a victim of Henry VIII faced the headsman, the standard scaffold speech praised the king: his justice, his mercy. You didn’t mean this, but you had to think about the people left behind: some flattery might help them. Oppressors don’t just want to do their deed, they want to take a bow: they want their victims to sing their praises. This doesn’t change, and it seems there are no new thoughts, no new struggles with censorship and self-censorship, only the old struggles repeating: half-animated corpses of forbidden childhood thoughts crawling out of the psychic trenches we have dug for them, and recurring denials by the great of the truths written on the bodies of the small.

I have 97 notebooks in a wooden box. I do not count them as suppressed volumes. I work on the principle that there is no failed work, only work pending: that there is nothing I won’t say, only what I haven’t said yet. In my novel in progress I have written, “If you cannot speak truth at a beheading, when can you speak it?” A notebook written eight years ago says, “I am searching for a place where the truth can be uttered: a place, I mean, that is not an execution ground.”